I’m not a big fan of the T-Shirt With Stuff Printed On It.
I would like to think that rather than using some sort of iron-on or silk-screened shorthand to tell you who I am, I’d rather you just come up and say “Hi” and find out for yourself what a self-absorbed, vain, yet kind-hearted and sexy dumb-ass I can be for yourself.

But sometimes, sometimes, I succumb to the lure of the T-Shirt With Stuff Printed On It.

But when I do, there have to be ground rules.
For example, rule number one is that normal people can’t get it.
The t-shirt and the stuff printed on it cannot and must not be able to be comprehended by Joe Six Pack (or Joe The Plumber) walking down the mall towards Sears.
It’s important that I establish myself as Cool, Neat, Groovy, Hip and possibly Smart with this shirt; and if anyone and their brother can read it, get it, smile at it and keep on walking, well then what the hell is the use?
It needs to be something weird, vague, spiffy, and come from something so utterly outside the mainstream that only someone who has their Ph.D. in Pop Culture could get it, and even then there might be a flickering moment of doubt that they got it wrong.

Next rule: Whomever I am sleeping with needs to look cute in it. Before clicking on “Order Now”, I need to be able to see the shirt being worn by a woman of exceptional beauty, intelligence and raw animal sexuality on a Saturday morning as she makes me my coffee and brings it to me in bed. She’s wearing the shirt, and nothing else except a knowing smile as she curls up next to me.

Third rule: Okay, there is no third rule. But people like lists that come in threes. So make up your own rule here and put it in the comments.

Recently, I have been infected with some sort of t-shirt buying fever, for lack of a better term. In the past two weeks, I’ve ordered three freakin’ shirts.

What the hell?!

Either t-shirt makers and designers are really stepping up their Weird and Rare game, or I’m due for a lot of weekend sleepovers and my new girlfriend needs a new wardrobe.

Either way, I got the first one in the mail today, and thought I would share it with you.

What do you think, Sirs?

Man, it seems like it was just yesterday that I and my Nerdish Friends at the USS Myrddin were walking around and around and around the track to help raise money to fight cancer.

I’ll keep this entry short and to the point.
I want you to donate money to me!

You can do it by going to my personal donation page here.

I know that times are tough these days.
Trust me, I know.
We all have our own personal struggles and road that we must travel. Sometimes that road is smooth, sometimes rough. Sometimes we gotta contract, sometimes we gotta expand.

I hope that this entry finds you in a giving mood, even if it’s just five bucks.

To remind you why I’m doing this, and begging for your fiver, you can go back and read my original blog entry here.

You can find out the results of last year’s walk here.

Not too shabby for an old dude!

Again, I hope you can give and I truly hope we can break last years mark of $695 and perhaps get an even $1,000. That would be freakin’ sweet.

If not, then hey - no big whoop! I am still you friend, still your buddy, still your big toe. Have a great holiday season, be safe, and be very very merry.

Oh yeah. We loves the merry.

Photo Credit: Relay for Life, originally uploaded by wvwolfeyes.

That’s right!
Just like Wal-Mart, Target, Pennys and any other retailer you could name, I’m starting Christmas in early November.
While it might be annoying, let’s just remember this: I’m going to give you a present!

It’s time again for me to mail out my Old Time Radio Christmas CD.
Some of you may be familiar with it, and even own it, but we’ve had a lot of new people reading the blog and subscribing to the feeds, so please bear with me while I explain to the new folks.

One of my geekier hobbies is that I love listening to Old Time Radio shows.
I love the nostalgia, the story telling, the hearkening to an earlier day when times were maybe not simpler, but different.

One year, I decided to collect some of the best Christmas and Holiday themed Old Time Radio shows and put them on a data cd and send them out for free to anyone who asks.

The collection is pretty varied. Right now, we got:

Christmas Music: Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis and many others.

Old Time Radio Shows: Usually a half an hour in length (including commercials), we’ve got a little bit of something for everyone: comedies, suspense, horror, science fiction and variety. Shows such as Dragnet, Duffy’s Tavern, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos and Andy, X Minus One, Nero Wolfe, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Gunsmoke and The Shadow, to name a few.

Dramas: I’ve included two complete dramatizations for you to listen to: Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and the radio version of Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life”.

Comedy: If you’ve seen the movie “A Christmas Story”, then you know all about Ralphie and the Red Ryder BB Gun, the Leg Lamp marked “Fragile” and the giant pink bunny rabbit suit. But did you know that the movie was based on the writings of Jean Shepherd? I’ve got several Jean Shepherds shows, including the one used as a basis for “A Christmas Story”.

The Complete Cinnamon Bear: That’s right. Every Cinnamon Bear episode, in its entirety. The Cinnamon Bear is a holiday adventure for kids of all ages. If you have nieces, nephews, sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, the will love the story of the Cinnamon Bear. You start listening to the first episode on Thanksgiving, and every night after that, you can listen to a new episode, with the adventure ending on Christmas Day. I’ve even included extras that you can print out, such a map, that your child can follow along with. Here’s a page that explains and has some history about The Cinnamon Bear series.

This CD, this collection of over 90 files, if played continuously, would add up to over 24 hours of listening enjoyment.

And it’s yours for free, if you’re a reader of this blog. All you gotta do is send me an email with your name and mailing address and it’s yours.

It’s my small, nerdy way of saying thank you to each and every one of you for supporting me and my writing.

Photo Credit: Zenith_10_S_443, originally uploaded by tmikeb22.

Ever since I can remember, ever since I’ve been on the tubes and wires that are the Internet, I have had a Yahoo! email address.
That’s about ten years.
One email address.
It’s the longest relationship I’ve ever had!

For the past several years, I’ve had Yahoo! branded Verizon DSL at home. It’s about $20 bucks a month. Because I pay, I get no ads in my email.

Until now.
Now Yahoo!, because their financials are in the crapper, has decided that even people paying to use their email service are going to get ads in their email.

We’re not talking minimalistic ads, like in gmail.
We’re talking ads all over the fucking place.
We’re talking above your folders, below your folders, to the right of your email when you’re trying to read it, to the right of your email when you’re trying to type it.

It’s just too ugly, too much wasted real estate and frankly, I’m paying for the fucker to begin with, why do you feel the need to make even more money off me with your ridiculous ads?

Oh. Yeah.
Because you’re finances are for shit.
I forgot about that.

Well, guess who’s going over to gmail?
I figure that gmail, along with the BetterGmail firefox extension, and my OSX Mail application, will be a fine, fine replacement for the crap-weasels at Yahoo.

So for everyone out there, please do me a solid and change my email address from willmize at yahoo dot com to willmize at gmail dot com.

Should you forget, you’ll get an automatically generated reminder, so no worries there.

Oh man. I just realized I need to get new business cards too.
Dammit!

So today, at about 4am, I started running again.
It was nice and cool, dark, silent, and felt wonderful.

Back when I was much younger and much healthier and much skinnier, I used to run about 10 miles a week (3 miles x 3 days), and I’d like to get back to that.

Now that I am much older, less healthier and have a bit of a Buddha belly, I’m starting from scratch. An absolute beginner.

And I’m using a plan called appropriately, The Couch to 5k Running Plan.
This is very appropriate, considering I spend a great deal of my spare time either at a desk, behind a monitor, or on a couch, in front of a television.

I like this plan because it’s a proven healthy and smart way to get started in running or get back into running. In the past, I’ve tried to start running again in the stupidest way possible:

• Put on running shoes.
• Walk out door.
• Start running.
• Get injured.
• Spend several weeks healing.
• Get distracted during healing, forget about running.

Repeat the above steps a few times and you have an entire year wasted.

Not again, say I!

The good thing about the Couch To 5k Plan is that you don’t start out running, you start out walking a bit, then running a bit, then walking a bit, then running a bit.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

You only run three days a week, with a rest day between.
This means you could do the traditional Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Or the more rare Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.
Me, I’m a traditionalist, so I ran and walked this morning.

To give you an idea, here’s how this morning went:

• Stretch for 3 to 5 minutes (this is the smart way to prevent injury, and I’m very susceptible to plantar fasciitis.
• Brisk 5 minute warm-up walk, to get the arms and legs and breathing all working together and your muscles warmed up.
• Run for 60 seconds.
• Walk for 90 seconds.
• Run for 60 seconds.
• Walk for 90 seconds.
• Repeat the above walking/running pattern until you reach 20 minutes.
• 5 minute cool down walk.
• Done!

Now, if you’re like me, and you’re a little fuzzy on details, it can be hard to keep track of the timing, no matter how fancy your digital watch is. This needs to be easy and convenient for me to do it, so I found some folks who created podcasts to go along with the Couch to 5k Plan.

You load the MP3 for the appropriate week onto your MP3 player, hit PLAY and off you go!
During the podcast, you get someone telling you, in your ear, when to walk and when to run.
Now that’s a great use for technology!

I was going to hunt down and post all these links, but thankfully, someone has already gathered the best links associated with the Couch To 5k Plan for me. Sweet!

Couch To 5k Page.

For the record, I’m using Robert Ullrey’s podcast, as I like the verbal cue in my ear, as opposed to the musical ones used by DJ Beatsmith.

I hope that you’ll join me on this journey.
We can all get moving, get fit, get healthy, burn off that fat, get rid of the Buddha belly and just feel better.

Let me know how you’re doing in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!

Usually I’m secretly into Halloween.
I love wearing costumes and going out and being someone else for an entire evening, but my history recently has been spending the evening alone, watching Horrorfest on AMC or plunking in one of the Halloween movies.

But not this year!
This year, I decided to be a brave little buckaroo.
Or rather, a brave and Crazy 88.

While I mourn the death of my employer, the powerful and feared O-Ren Ishii and my comrades in arms at the hands of The Bride, I did manage to go out last night and have one hell of a great time at The Venue at their Vampires and Vixens ball.

Even though only one person (possibly two) knew who the hell I was. I give one guy half credit for thinking I was either The Green Hornet, or maybe even Kato.

What the hell - they were drunk and I look freakin’ awesome.

This question is going out to everyone; all the foot soldiers in the Denton and Monty army.

Since Oprah came out, waved her magical marketing wand of Goodness and gave amazon’s e-reader, the Kindle, her blessing as the gadget of the year, or the best gadget EVAR, or whatever the hell - I’ve been thinking about expanding the Denton and Monty brand into the e-book arena, specifically, the Kindle.

Here’s the questions, feel free to answer in the comments or drop me an email.

1) Kindle editions of “Resurrection Angel”, “Everlasting Life” and all future books? Yes or no.
2) If you answered “yes” to the above, how much would you pay for it?

I’m personally still fence sitting on the whole e-book phenomenon.
Until they can come up with a reader that either reads all existing formats, or come up with a universal format, and lower the price a hell of a lot more, I can’t see it becoming the indispensable, must-have that Oprah thinks it is.

I don’t know who her audience is, or what daydream she’s having (considering the current economy), but I think it’s a very, very small percentage of her viewers who are going to run out and plunk down $300 to $350 for one of these things.

Your thoughts? Let me has them.

After listening, if you have any comments or questions, drop it in the Comments section below, and I’ll be glad to help.

This past weekend was my first weekend after NecronomiCon, and I was looking to get a fresh start, using the momentum and excitement from the convention as impetus.

Besides working on marketing materials that I’ll need for after the first of the year, I also took a good hard look at the current project, the third book in the series, Spear of Destiny.

After reading through it, I came to a cold, hard decision: It was good, but it wasn’t good enough.

So I threw it away.

Complete reboot.

Starting over.

From scratch.

Page one.

Trust me, this one hurt me just as much as it might be hurting you True Fans who have been patiently waiting for this book for quite some time.

I’ve put a lot of work, a lot of research into this book, but it just always seemed “off”, for lack of a better word. It was always just out of focus, just a bit off pace, just a hair crooked.

Something was missing, and I couldn’t put my finger on it until this weekend.

But, after about two hours of furious journal writing, brainstorming and daydreaming, I figured out what was wrong and also figured out how to “fix it”, make it an even better book than it was ever going to be a few days before.

Jesus, is this thing going to be good.
Scary good.
Breakthrough good.

Think about how much of a leap “Everlasting Life” was from “Resurrection Angel”.
Now think about how much of a leap “Spear of Destiny” can be from “Everlasting Life”.

I know you’ve been patient, and you’ve been supportive and kind, and I truly appreciate it, and I hope and pray that you’ll continue to do so.

I tell these stories for myself, of course, but I also tell them for you; those of you who have really embraced this series and these two characters. I only want to do my best work for you. Realistically, I could crank out half-assed stories and novels at a pretty break-neck pace, but I don’t want those to be my legacy, after I shake off this mortal coil.

As an artist, and a creator, I really do think about my legacy - what I’m leaving behind. I often wonder if other musicians, writers, poets, filmmakers, think about these things, or if they just live here, in the now, for the next paycheck or royalty check or whatever.

I want to leave 12 books (or more) behind that really reflect what I was like, what these times we are going through are like. I want my work to be genuine. I want that reader, when they look at my books on their bookshelf, to do so with a sense of pride. I would hope that I am leaving behind books that draw a reader back for a second, third or fourth reading.

Books that will last.

That’s what I want to write.

That’s right. One of the big things to come out of NecronomiCon was my decision to again offer, straight from my office to your mailbox, autographed copies of Resurrection Angel and Everlasting Life.

Yes, I take PayPal.
Yes, you can buy gifts for others.
Yes, I give you a discount if you get both books.

All the relevant information is here, but if there’s something that’s unclear, just drop me an email and we can discuss.